Communication

With seven children in the house, a wife, and people I work with, it feels like I move from one crucial conversation to another. It feels like I move from one conversation that is important to my relationship with someone to the next one. Certainly I’m n...

Years ago I met Paul Culmsee . He and I were speaking at a SharePoint best practices conference and we became fast friends – even though he lives halfway across the planet in Perth, Australia. Over the years we’ve had numerous early morning/late nigh...

Sometimes my book reviews take on a life of their own. While preparing for my review of Dialogue: The Art of Thinking Together , I started to gather some thoughts on one of the key aspects of dialogues, which is the impact of defensive routines. Before ...

I’ve written about Dialogue before. I initially summarized my thoughts from The Fifth Discipline  and Dialogue Mapping  in a post called Discussion and Dialogue for Learning . More recently I posted about one aspect of Dialogue in my post on Defensive Routine...

This is second in the three part series of blog posts about dialogue spawned by Dialogue . The first part was about Defensive Routines . In this post I’ll talk about the inner game of dialogue, what you and everyone else has to do to allow dialogue to ...

Getting along with others is the biggest challenge of our human existence.  Sure, there are easy conversations – but there are difficult ones, too.  Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most is a guidebook for walking through the con...

I’m about as far away from an ethnographer as you can get. I live in the heart of the United States and in the same home for over 20 years. And yet, I use ethnographic interviewing in one form or another every single week. How can it be that I’m not emb...

I’m always trying to improve my craft. As it pertains to my keynote and educational speaking, it’s not always easy to find people who can press me to improve. That’s why I took the standup comedy course years ago as I described in my post I am a Come...

When I first started reading about humility, I was struck by the idea "power held in service to others." Edgar Schein's Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling brings that power through asking questions. He proposes that when we're...

One of the problems I have with my blog – and I’m keenly aware – is that its text based. While I insert the occasional graphic, because of the logistics of the medium it’s difficult to get the level of images in the stories. I also find that I’m often try...

It’s easy to get wrapped up in big data, AI, and quantitative approaches to research and forget that there’s another dimension to research that is just as important as – if not more important than – the numbers that we seem to be driven by.  The Long...

Have you ever felt like you’re in a discussion where the other person isn’t following the rules of logic? Have you ever felt like you knew things were off but you weren’t sure exactly why? I’ve felt that way, and that’s why when the book Mastering Logical Fa...

What does a physicist have to say about dialogue? It turns out, if that physicist is David Bohm, a lot. Bohm’s work has been referenced from six of the books that I’ve already reviewed (Science and Pseudoscience in Clinical Psychology,   Dialogue: The A...

It’s not exaggeration to say that Joseph Campbell is a legend when it comes to mythology.  The book, The Power of Myth , comes from a series of interviews that Campbell did with Bill Moyers while Campbell was in his eighties.  The legendary journalist tha...

I’m no stranger to presentations. I’ve averaged over 50 presentations a year for several years now. So on average every week I’m getting in front of a crowd with the privilege of sharing my experience. As a natural consequence of so much presenting you’l...

Stories are narratives that help others put pieces together, and while many of the stories we encounter in the media and in the movies are fictional, the kinds of stories you’re implored to tell in Seven Stories Every Salesperson Must Tell are non-fictional.  Th...

I mentioned in my review of Presentation Zen  that I was looking for some input on how to structure my slides so that I could best leverage them in the studio. One of the other books I reached into for inspiration was Slide:ology . I had seen Nancy Du...

If you had a burning passion to write a novel, how would you do it? Starting from scratch and never having done it before, what steps would you take? The answer may lie inside of Story Genius: How to Use Brain Science to Go Beyond Outlining and Write ...

One of the things that I realized is that all humans have the innate ability to speak – save those unfortunate souls who are mute. Sometime shortly after our first birthday our vocabulary bursts forth and we begin our lifelong dance with speaking. Later w...

It became a joke.  It’s a simple response that started occurring about ten years ago.  It was “Thanks for the feedback.”  It’s a shortened version of the book title, Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well .  The product...

I stumbled across Buster Benson’s work through the cognitive bias codex – a listing of 200 or so known cognitive biases. That led me to his book, Why Are We Yelling?: The Art of Productive Disagreement . I’ve read several books on conflict and disagr...

Socrates thought that books would do terrible things to our memories. Since the beginning of time, our knowledge had been passed on in the oral tradition of stories. These stories were memorized and repeated. They were handed down from generation to generation,...